ABSTRACT
The spring of 2020 represented a watershed-moment-in-the-making, as broad, inclusive discussions on how to best cultivate discursive and policy mechanisms towards racial equity presaged a reckoning with America’s vast ethnoracial disparities. However, many of the remediatory actions proposed and thus far implemented have failed to address historic, epistemologically-embedded forms of racism that anchor and validate repressive informatics structures and thereby enable knowledge colonization. Focussing on a social psychological concept of “empathy plasticity”, the critical developmental window in which humans begin to formulate attitudes and dispositions on phenomena around them, this commentary explores how a re-organization of online spaces, such as Wikipedia and social media, can be used to more holistically present knowledge on topics in the realm of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Such a technocratic shift is one means of content democratization and dialectical gatekeeping to ensure our contemporary epistemology acquires and maintains methodological, ideological and ethical merit.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.